Civil Liberties: The 2004 Forecast

If the first few weeks of 2004 are any indication, the Bush administration is stepping up its assault on civil liberties. A few legislative victories for civil liberties have done little to stop the over all trend toward more and more repressive legislation. Looking at what’s happened in just the first two weeks of 2004, here’s an overview of eight things to expect the rest of the year.

1) Silence

On Jan. 12 the Supreme Court turned down an appeal challenging the secrecy surrounding the arrests and detentions of hundreds of people in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Not a single link to terrorism has been proven from these arrests, which came largely during the mandatory registration of men from Muslim countries a year ago, and many of the arrestees have already been deported for immigration violations.

Yet the Supreme Court upheld the previous decision of a U.S. Court of Appeals that releasing information about the arrests "would give terrorist organizations a composite picture of the government investigation." Since by most measures it was an ineffective investigation as far as preventing terrorism goes, it seems the most this composite picture would do is give "terrorists " more scorn for our judicial system. Effectively closing the books on this case should be seen not only as a civil liberties violation for those involved and their families, many of whom are legal U.S. residents, but for the general public. A precedent is set every time the administration is able to get away with imposing secrecy and silence in the name of national security. Now the court is essentially saying that even two years after the terrorist attacks, the citizenry doesn't have the right to examine or evaluate their government's response.

Meanwhile, detainees are still being held in Guantanamo Bay without right to counsel or the courts, as the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of this arrangement. Though this could end up being a civil liberties victory depending on how the court rules, the matter is still up in the air. "In depriving the Guantanamo prisoners of the universally recognized right to due process before the law, our government not only flouts the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but the 'decent opinion of mankind' sought by our nation's founders in the Declaration of Independence," said ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero in a statement, as the ACLU and other groups filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the detainees. "No government should be able to assume such unilateral authority over people's basic rights, most crucially during times of threat to our own democracy."

2. Surveillance

The PATRIOT Act hasn't been in the news quite so much lately; and civil liberties proponents breathed a sigh of relief when the proposed so-called PATRIOT Act II was revealed by the media and consequently tabled last year. But the fact is the surveillance and other tenets of the PATRIOT Act are being used as you read this, and there is doubtless work still going on behind the scenes to push through the more extreme measures of PATRIOT Act II in different ways. Perhaps the first big civil liberties- surveillance related measure to be rolled out in 2003 was the U.S.-VISIT program, in which foreign visitors and immigrants are fingerprinted and photographed upon entry to the U.S. Citizens of 27 European and other U.S.-allied countries are exempt, however. This is a gap of logic -- there is no reason citizens of these countries wouldn't be plotting terrorist acts -- just remember failed shoe-bomber and British national Richard Reid. And more important, it is another way to needlessly build resentment against the U.S. by infringing on the civil liberties of foreign visitors. "You fingerprint someone when they're going to prison," said an 18-year-old Mexican man arriving at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, to start his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, on Jan. 5, the first day of U.S.-VISIT. "Do they want us to feel like prisoners here? How would you like it?" Brazil decided to reciprocate by fingerprinting U.S. citizens, and apparently an American pilot, Dale Robbin Hirsh, didn't like it very much. He was arrested Jan. 14 after flipping the bird to Brazilian agents; he was charged with showing disrespect to authorities, a crime that can carry a six-month to two-year jail sentence.